1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to tubing terminations and more particularly to coupling employing crimped-on or swaged-on tubing terminations.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Many hose terminations, such as port fittings or stems, are currently brazed, soldered or welded onto tubing to provide a means for permanently attaching the tubing to hoses or ports. These are expensive processes that may require significant investment in capital equipment, significant energy costs, relatively tight tolerances for the tubing and fittings, skilled personnel, and post-finishing operations. Thus, these operations often cannot be utilized at a hose assembly fabricator near the customer and have inherent variability, the quality of which may be difficult to evaluate pre failure. These factors combine to allow for unacceptable defect level in stems and terminations brazed, soldered or welded onto tubing, resulting in elevated costs and downtime.
Other methods are known for joining fittings to a tube or joining two tubes. As one example of joining two tubes, Hyatt, U.S. Pat. No. 5,069,058 discloses a swaging tool is provided for swaging a fitting and joining two tubes together. The tool of Hyatt compresses, or swages, a special fitting so that the fitting is given an irregular configuration along its inner wall and correspondingly swages the tube to match the inner wall. Problematically, this deformation of the tube might result in significant deformation of the inner wall of the tube in such a manner as to disrupt or perturb fluid flow through the tube. Further, such a swaging arrangement is not particularly well suited, for attaching a tubing termination, such as a port or a stem, to a tube. Such a swaging process may also be time consuming and require costly components, as such it is not necessarily suited to high volume manufacturing.